wp-plugin-hostgator
domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init
action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home4/scienrds/scienceandnerds/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114ol-scrapes
domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init
action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home4/scienrds/scienceandnerds/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114Source:https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2022\/04\/07\/why-binance-led-the-axie-infinity-bailout-and-what-it-means-for-cryptos-future\/<\/a><\/br> The company behind<\/span> Axie Infinity, a popular crypto play-to-earn game, raised $150 million in funding this week<\/a> to help reimburse users who lost funds worth about $625 million<\/a> in a hack last week. Axie Infinity\u2019s creator, Vietnamese gaming studio Sky Mavis, had garnered wide acclaim for building the most-played NFT game of all time, with 2.2 million monthly active players, according to the company.<\/p>\n What\u2019s interesting about this funding round is that it was led by crypto exchange Binance \u2014 the highest-volume exchange globally \u2014 although Binance hadn\u2019t participated in Sky Mavis\u2019 prior raises. More on that later, but first, some context.<\/p>\n Existing Sky Mavis investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm and Accel, joined Binance in this round to help bail out Axie, but once news of the hack broke, their involvement was all but expected. Those investors already had a financial stake in the game\u2019s success, particularly a16z, which led the company\u2019s $152 million Series B round last October<\/a>. Sky Mavis earned a nearly $3 billion valuation during that round, signifying quite a bit of fanfare for a company that had raised a total of just $7.5 million five months prior.<\/p>\n The hack, which took place on Axie\u2019s Ethereum-based sidechain, Ronin, marks the largest known crypto heist to date. It was a bad look not only for Sky Mavis, but also for investors like a16z that had hyped Axie as the future of crypto. It begins to look even worse when you consider the demographics of Axie players overall \u2014 over 25% are unbanked<\/a>, the company said, and many are low-income workers in developing countries who rely on Axie for a significant portion of their income.<\/p>\n It took six days before Sky Mavis or any of its investors discovered the hack had occurred, which infuriated a lot of people, and once the company found out, it immediately scrambled for solutions. While Sky Mavis announced it was working with law enforcement to investigate the situation, it\u2019s very rare for funds to be recovered after a crypto hack, let alone returned to users. The search process is just too complex, given that there\u2019s no information about the hacker readily available besides the wallet address they used to transfer funds out of Axie.<\/p>\n It\u2019s worth noting that the majority of the funds are still sitting in the hacker\u2019s wallet, although the hacker did appear to move some 2,000 ETH<\/a> out of the wallet to privacy tool Tornado Cash, which allows users to mask their wallet address while withdrawing funds.<\/p>\n So if Sky Mavis couldn\u2019t track down the hacker and recover the funds that way, it had to think of other ways to make up the shortfall or risk the reputational hit of letting its users take a huge financial loss that stemmed from the company\u2019s own security weaknesses.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n <\/br><\/br><\/br><\/p>\n
\nWhat the Binance bailout of Axie Infinity means for crypto\u2019s future<\/br>
\n2023-01-20 22:56:24<\/br><\/p>\n